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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that Glen Barber has joined the Foundation's growing team of technical staff.

Glen has been involved with FreeBSD since 2007, and is currently a member of the FreeBSD Release Engineering and Cluster Administration teams. Glen will continue supporting the FreeBSD Project through those roles, in addition to maintaining the FreeBSD Foundation's own servers and equipment.

As part of his role Glen will support the Release Engineering team by improving the release build process. This includes the generation and release of virtual machine images, enhanced support for embedded targets, package building infrastructure, and release quality assurance tools.

Friday, August 16, 2013

The Foundation is pleased to announce that Gábor Kövesdán has completed a funded project to improve the infrastructure behind the documentation project. Here is how Gabor describes the project.

Our documentation infrastructure uses very old and discontinued standards and tools. The work on modernising it has already started but still not yet completed. After discussions, we agreed that the migration of the toolchain had to be done in several smaller milestones for better quality assurance. The first major step changed the syntax to a more XML-like one but still allowed some SGML constructs. This is what we currently use in head. The second step is nearing completion and it will upgrade documentation from DocBook 4.2 to DocBook 4.5 and at the same time migrate to proper XML tools. A significant exception to this is PDF rendering, which will still use Jade and DSSSL stylesheets. DSSSL is an old and dead standard, which will not evolve any more. The only available open source DSSSL processors are Jade and OpenJade. Their development is also discontinued. This means a serious technology and vendor lock-in for the documentation project. The aim of this proposal is to eliminate this technology and vendor lock-in.

The following deliverables are provided as a result of the project:

A DocBook 5.0 tree of the documentation. The basic set is available in projects/db5 but still the converter has to be run on a fresh checkout. The converter can be obtained from user/gabor/db5 and it has a README, which explains how it works. The converted sources are not checked in because in this way merges are easier and adjustments of conversion parameters is still possible. These are flexible until the moment when we merge this to head.

A FOP-based rendering toolchain. This gives high quality output and after some last touches it will be print quality. I18N support is really good, all languages can be rendered in high quality. In particular, Xin Li (delphij@) confirmed that the Simplified Chinese is output is very close to print quality. A full PDF build can be found here: http://kovesdan.org/files/fop/

A dblatex-based rendering toolchain. This toolchain is more limited. Its customization is more difficult and non-Latin text is not wrapped properly. Also, it fails with programlistings in tables so it cannot build the whole documentation set. This is a limitation that is explicitly listed in the dblatex documentation. This is a Java-free solution and is probably good enough to render release notes. In most cases, it is still better than the current PDF rendering but it does not give us full support and such a high quality as FOP. Some sample documents can be found here: http://kovesdan.org/files/dblatex/

During this work, I have discovered some things that are not related to the rendering itself but should be addressed before the print edition of Handbook:

Indexterms are misused. They are not placed to the correct location, which may result in incorrect page number references. Also, there are outdated entries. Besides, some best practices should be consulted and applied to our docs. For example, should we index company names and brands or just technical terms? And which ones? And what are the conventions for secondary indexterms? I think they are a bit abused as well. And probably we should avoid third and further levels. We need to standardize this a bit and document it in fdp-primer. For such a huge manual as the Handbook, it is very important to have a good and usable index.

Sectioning has too many levels. It is recommended to limit them to 3 or 4 when it is really necessary. In DocBook terms, it means using only sect2 and sect3 but not sect4. There are several places where such appear.

Markup is sometimes overused. There are plenty of admonitions (warning, notes, ...), some of them in lists, tables in examples and tables in admonitions and such. These are meant to facilitate reading but when abused they are just confusing and overwhelming.

Monday, August 12, 2013

For the third year in a row, we’ll be organizing a Vendor Summit during the Developer Summit prior to the EuroBSDCon conference, this year in Malta on September 26 and 27. In previous years, we’ve had a number of presentations by companies, like NETASQ, pfSense and Netflix, on how they successfully built their products and services on top of FreeBSD, and how contributing code back to the community actually can save them money in the long term by reducing internal maintenance costs.

This year, I’d like to change to focus more towards an open discussion between vendors and other large consumers, not only so you can learn from each other, but also so the FreeBSD community can learn more on how their product is used. We’ve long heard that binary packages were the Achilles heal of FreeBSD. Are we on the right track with PKGNG? Java-support is another issue, but is there anything else you are missing that maybe some other company may have an existing solution for they may be able to contribute, but hadn’t thought about anyone else was looking for? Or maybe you have an problem that’s too big for one company to fix, but can be fixed if some of you together fund a project to do so. The FreeBSD Foundation might be able to help.

This is an invitation-only event, please contact me at erwin@freebsdfoundation.org if you would like to attend. If you have anything to present or any topic you would like to discuss, please contact me as well. This will be an informal event, but we welcome a few short presentations.